I am going to make a post here even though my intent is not to join the debate. Of course I am not making promises here.
What I want to say is that the doctrine of the trinity is one of the most amazing things to ponder about God. It makes God so unlike us, so distant and yet so intimate, so wonderfully far above us and yet with us. The doctrine of the trinity means there is non like him in all the earth. People try to illustrate the doctrine of the trinity and it always falls sort because there is none like our God. While this makes the doctrine of the trinity majestic and other worldly, it also makes the doctrine difficult. The doctrine is so difficult, that the detractors of the doctrine regularly misrepresent the doctrine. The most common argument is to make the doctrine of the trinity into a doctrine which is about 3 Gods. Of course that is not what trinitarians believe. We always have been monotheistic, and of course are still monotheistic, and always will believe in one God. Monotheism is something easy to understand because we are mono-person beings. Oddly enough, those who deny the eternity of Christ are more polytheistic then trinitarians. If Christ is a lesser God, then there are more than one God and pseudo-Christianity becomes a polytheistic religion by having degrees of deity.
The key issue to me seems to be the eternity of Christ. If he is eternal, then the doctrine of the trinity stands. If Jesus is not eternal, then we must explain who Jesus was. He ends up being a lesser God or some created being. For Jesus to be a lesser God creates all sorts of difficulties. Is he really then worthy of worship?
The Nicean creed was genius in its understanding of the Trinitarian doctrine. One of the key clauses was (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_versions_of_the_Nicene_Creed_in_current_use)
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
Christ was not a created being. He is eternal, just as the Father. There never was a time that the Father came into being. There never was a time when the Father was not generating the Son. Christ is eternally begotten.
While this is a very biblical doctrine, it is not easy to grasp. It stretches the mind to think in terms of eternity. This is the distant, wonderfully far above us aspect of the existence of God I referred to above.
Of course this affects my view of the glory of God. If God created a 2ndary being to accomplish my salvation, then salvation itself seems less glorious. If God directly accomplished my salvation, then I marvel at his love and glory in that he himself saved me, not some 2ndary created being.
All this, does not make the concept of 3 persons easy to understand. How can the Father have a will, and yet the Son has a will, and yet they are one being. Christ himself said of his earthly life, "not my will, but they will be done." The will is an aspect of the personhood of the Father and Christ. They are different persons. Yet the scripture is clear that there is only one God (Deuternonmy 6:4). Thus the doctrine that the one God is one in being, one in essence, but three persons.
While people have their own favorite passages to defend the doctrine of the trinity, mine is in Colossians 2
9 for in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily,
Christ was not a lesser God who was created by the father (eternally generated... yes, but not created-- see the nicean creed). Christ, in his attributes was complete in his fullness of all divine attributes. There is nothing that the Father did, that Christ could not do. While Christ did not give up one divine attribute, he did "humble himself" and took upon himself flesh, and became obedient, even to his death on the cross. He made choices not according to his own will, but according to the will of the Father. This does not mean Christ did not have his own will, or his own emotions, or his own thinking, or his own personhood. He had all those things, but gave up use of his divine power, and at times also his own will. Christ did this to become fully human. We give up our will and accept the Fathers will to be like Christ.
While the Son of God is eternal, there is a sense in which he came into being and was created. When Christ took upon himself human form, he left his glory above. He was generated by the Holy Spirit in the virgin womb of his human mother Mary. This is totally fascinating. How can a person of the Godhead become man? How can omnipotency become impotent? To illustrate, let me speak of his omnipresence. In the OT, when it says God came down to Sinai, that is a condescension to our human frailty. God, being omnipresent, did not go somewhere that he already was. God cannot "come down to Sinai" because he is already there. The scripture puts it this way for our benefit. But now think of Christ.... Having the "fullness of the Godhead bodily" Christ was omnipresent. Yet while he existed in Galilee and in Judea at the same time, being omnipresent, he also walked from Galilee to Judea in bodily form. Christ was both fully God and fully man. The condescension from divine attributes to human attributes totally amazes me, and stretches my mind. How could this be!!! Yet Christ did this... he was omnipresent, and yet found in bodily form and he did this to save me.
Take away the doctrine of the trinity, and you have something less than God. Christ would not be omnipresent, he would not be eternal, he would simply not be glorious. Take away the doctrine of the trinity and you have God's love being insufficient to save me himself. He created someone else who provides a lesser salvation, a salvation not so glorious.
I could ramble on and on about the glories of our God and the doctrine of the trinity, but suffice it to say, I do not worship a lesser God, a created being, but I worship the one true glorious God. To God be the Glory.
(uh-oh 
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